Bullet comes with autogenerated Project Files for Microsoft Visual Studio 6, 7, 7.1 and 8. The main Workspace/Solution is located in Bullet/msvc/8/wksbullet.sln (replace 8 with your version).

Under other platforms, like Linux or Mac OS-X, Bullet can be build using either using make, cmake, http://www.cmake.org , or jam, http://www.perforce.com/jam/jam.html . cmake can autogenerate Xcode, KDevelop, MSVC and other build systems. just run cmake . in the root of Bullet. So if you are not using MSVC or cmake, you can run ./autogen.sh ./configure to create both Makefile and Jamfile and then run make or jam. Jam is a build system that can build the library, demos and also autogenerate the MSVC Project Files. If you don't have jam installed, you can make jam from the included jam-2.5 sources, or download jam from ftp://ftp.perforce.com/jam

Try to run and experiment with BasicDemo executable as a starting point. Bullet can be used in several ways, as Full Rigid Body simulation, as Collision Detector Library or Low Level / Snippets like the GJK Closest Point calculation. The Dependencies can be seen in this documentation under Directories

Check out BasicDemo how to create a btDynamicsWorld, btRigidBody and btCollisionShape, Stepping the simulation and synchronizing your graphics object transform. Check out SoftDemo how to use soft body dynamics, using btSoftRigidDynamicsWorld.